One man’s opinion of Netflix’ Marvel’s Iron Fist or I watched it so you don’t have to.
By B
(Probable spoilers ahead, but you won’t care, because this show sucks.)
I was pretty excited when the Iron Fist show was announced. Not because I was a huge fan of the character – I only knew the surface info for Danny Rand. I knew the broad strokes. The character was created in the seventies to capitalize on the Kung-Fu craze sweeping the nation. He was a goofy rich white dude. He was kind of impulsive and fun. That was about it.
Netflix did a fantastic job of producing a show about Luke Cage, another character created to capitalize on the explosion of a seventies craze – Blaxploitation. Cage embraced its subject matter and creative lineage, but took it on in a serious manner. It wasn’t Dolemite. It wasn’t Black Dynamite. This was a Netflix show being run by a Black creator which embraced and addressed issues facing the Black community in the US today. It utilized a Blaxploitation-era comic book character in a thoughtful way and was pretty darned entertaining to boot. (And, damn – the soundtrack and musical performances featured on the show – wow!)
Prior to that, Jessica Jones dealt thoughtfully with someone grappling with the aftermath of sexual assault and addiction (even if the season maybe could have been trimmed by an episode or two). Daredevil had two seasons that were very creatively successful. Daredevil Season Two went particularly hard with action and violence, to great entertainment value. Daredevil brought in characters like the Punisher and Elektra, and had a monster battle against The Hand at the end of the season. Daredevil fought ninjas! A million, billion ninjas! Holy Hell!
Iron Fist achieves none of the success of its predecessors.
Danny Rand returns to New York after the plane his family was in disappeared 12 years earlier. He’s been declared legally dead and life has moved on without him. The show seems to mistake being absent from New York with being absent from life. As we learn, Danny was rescued from the plane crash by monks, and raised in a mystical city that is occasionally accessible in the Himalayas. He was trained to be a Kung-Fu master. He is a highly trained and skilled warrior. He had friends and relationships (but no sexy-time, due to a vow of celibacy). Yet, when he returns to New York, he acts like he’s a 12-year-old. He behaves like a child for basically the entire show. Why are people mean to me? Why don’t they wanna be my friend? Maybe it’s because you’re acting like an unlikeable child. It’s as though he disappeared through a portal when he was 12, and reappeared in New York in an adult body, with magical powers and training, but had no life experience in between.
Danny also suffers from PTSD. We know this, because we get six flashbacks in the first two episodes in which he experiences and relives the plane crash and the loss of his parents. The flashbacks basically show the same scene over and over, without giving us any new information. It seems a little odd that someone that has a decade of training to process his emotions to center himself, so much so that he can harness his energy into an unbeatable fist of iron, has no emotional control. Danny somehow achieved the incredibly high degree of skill that allowed him to claim the mantle of The Iron Fist while being an emotional wreck that has flashbacks reliving his past trauma and causing him to lash out at those around him. Weird.
The main villain, we’re lead to believe, is The Hand. The Iron Fist is meant to destroy The Hand – it’s his purpose. (But, also, to never leave the gate to the mystical city of K’un Lun. This part of his duty seems to conflict with his other purpose, unless The Hand just happens to all show up at the gate. To the writer’s credit, Danny does comment on this in one of the later episodes.) The Hand, as we have learned in this show and in Daredevil, is an ancient, mystical criminal organization. Also, they sell fancy heroin. In Daredevil, we saw hints of broader, more nefarious aims. In Iron Fist, mostly they sell fancy heroin. And interact with fancy New York business types. In Daredevil, as I mentioned earlier, The Hand protects their interest with the ninjas in their service. A million, billion ninjas. In Iron Fist, a show about a master of the martial arts, there are NO FREAKING NINJAS. The Hand protects itself with some random dudes with guns and kids in track suits. To be fair, at one point, Danny does fight two Line Cooks and an Arachnologist. But no ninjas. Did all the ninjas leave New York after the second season of Daredevil? Where are the goddamn ninjas? Not that it would matter, because…
The fight choreography is kind of terrible. Remember the amazing Hallway Fight in Daredevil? There’s one in this show, too. Like, there is literally a fight that occurs in a hallway. Danny and his partner are stuck in the middle of the hallway, with foes approaching from both sides. They quickly dispatch of the ten guys that attack them and walk away. It is over in a couple of seconds, and it the exact opposite of exciting. Again, for a show whose main character is a martial arts expert, the expectations for the fights in this show were pretty high. Yet, the fight choreography in every other Marvel Netflix show is better and more distinctive. Daredevil effectively mixed martial arts with boxing and back-alley brawling. Luke Cage fights effortlessly, and looks a little annoyed that while doing it – “Come on, guys – do we have to do this? I’m super strong and have unbreakable skin – we’re just going to wreck a bunch of stuff and destroy my shirt again.” Jessica Jones is the least polished fighter, and I don’t mean that as a slight. The character’s lack of formal fight training is incorporated into her style – she’s a sloppy brawler with super strength, not a trained technical combatant. Danny Rand is supposed to be, basically, the most skilled martial artist in the world. But the fights aren’t shot well, the choreography is lazy, and the wire work looks bad. Is it possible that lead actor Finn Jones just couldn’t pick it up? Is it possible that nobody knew how to shoot the action? Is it a combination of the two? It’s unclear. The best fight scene in the entire series pits Danny against a Drunken Master. The Drunken Master is interesting. His fighting style is visually compelling and different than anything else in the show. After giving Danny a thorough ass-whupping, he is, of course, quickly defeated because it’s time to move on to something boring again.
Maybe it doesn’t matter that the fight choreography wasn’t focused on so much. Why? Because this show about the most highly-skilled mystical martial artist in the world is really about…Big Business! How will The Iron Fist defeat the real enemy – the sharks in the board room? Who. Fucking. Cares. You see, Danny wants to get back his father’s company. He keep saying that he doesn’t want that, but he works really hard to do it. “That’s my father’s name up there! My name!” Then he’s on the Board! (I think there was some kind of legal proceeding before this to get him to be officially declared Alive again, and get back all of his money, but, I’ll be honest – I fell asleep repeatedly during those episodes.) Anyway, he’s back in the board room! But he doesn’t really want it. And you can tell, because he wears sneakers with his business suit. Can you believe it? What a slack-ass rebel! He does not take the business world seriously! It really feels like most of this show is focused on the company, which is tied in to fighting people that aren’t ninjas as the series progresses, but damn, do we ever spend a ton of time in the office. If you skipped through all of the office scenes, I bet you can cut your viewing time of the entire series by at least 50%. This much time spent in the office would be fine, if the scenes were at all interesting and well written. But they’re not. The dialogue is bad. The scenes are deadly boring. So boring that you begin to long for a badly performed fight scene. Or a ninja. Or a line cook. Or someone that studies spiders.
